AVENGERS ASSEMBLE - that ole Whedon magic!

Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble is about as good as it gets for a superhero blockbuster movie.  The action set pieces are thrilling; the emotional stakes are high; and in Robert Downey Junior, Whedon has found the perfect avatar for his trademark pop-culture savvy wit.  The movie itself is the logical culmination of all those marvel adaptations we've seen in recent years, from the less successful (Hulks inter alia) to the commercially successful (Jon Favreau's Iron Man) to the hammy (Thor) to the more emotionally satisfying (Captain America.) 

In this flick, the MacGuffin is the tesseract: a blue cube that apparently unleashes untold energy that can be used for good or ill.  When Thor's resentful brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) comes to earth, wanting to use the tesseract to bring in an alien army, it's up to Samuel L Jackson's slippery government agent to unite the superheroes and save the world.   

Whedon does a masterful job of handling a wide cast of characters, of whom the audiences have different levels of familiarity.  He uses a prologue to set up Loki's theft of the MacGuffin then quickly moves to a couple of scenes that set up the new characters of the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansen)  and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and re-establish Dr Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).  From there we're into the meat of the story:  whether the Avengers can put aside their personality differences and learn to work together. This take us through spectacular action set pieces in a flying aircraft carrier/ supherhero lair and an alien obliteration of midtown Manhattan. 

For me, the brilliance of Whedon isn't just the witty dialogue, although that sure goes a long way to lighten up a movie that's basically about macho blokes beating each other up.  His genius is that he can crack jokes while simultaneously giving characters emotional doth and complexity in a few short scenes.  This is particularly true of the way in which he depicts Bruce Banner as a deeply sympathetic, borderline suicidal genius struggling with "the other man".  What's amazing is that Whedon/Ruffalo's Banner is simultaneously the most emotionally interesting and realistic character but also the one that generates the biggest belly laughs. His scenes in the final battle where he thumps Thor and throws Loki around like so much confetti are absolute crowd-pleasers. 

And that brings me to the final reason why Whedon has made the best summer blockbuster I've seen in a long time: he knows how to direct action!  Too many modern films have action sequences so frenetic that it's hard for the viewer to keep pace with the choreography of what's actually happening.  I'd blame Michael Bay, but I think among the better quality filmmakers, the desire to imitate Paul Greengrass' Bourne films is also to blame.  Whedon gives us all the loud bangs and crashes but never, never, let's us lose sit of the bugger picture. He keeps us engaged at every turn. And that's what makes AVENGERS ASSEMBLE a superhero movie with wit, heart and exhilarating action.  I can't wait for the next installment. 

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE AKA THE AVENGERS is on global release. The running time is 143 minutes. The US rating is PG-13 but parents be warned: there's a sneaky quim joke!

WAR HORSE

I have neither read Michael Morpurgo's children's novel nor seen the acclaimed National Theatre production of War Horse. I came to the material fresh, though wary of Steven Spielberg's attachment to it.  To my mind, Spielberg is a supremely flawed director, for whom story is subservient to sentiment.  His films are peopled with father-less children; heroic underdogs; and they have a quite risible tendency to refocus history on the few good acts rather than the wider evil. I find this inability to look bleak truth in the eye somehow insulting to those that lived through those times - a slippery fiction - and sadly, WAR HORSE is no exception.  For Spielberg has created a drama about a war in which millions died that continually cuts away from tragedy and focuses on sun-dappled scenes of goodness. It is emotional manipulation of the most vulgar kind, despicable, and dishonest. 

The story is meant to be one of the triumph of the underdog, and the triumph of love and loyalty.  Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan) is a poor farmer who buys a beautiful thoroughbred rather than a plough-horse to spite his landlord (David Thewlis) and palliate the pain of surviving the Boer War. His son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) turns "Joey" into a working horse against everyone's expectations, but the pony is requisitioned by Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) and taken to war.  As the cavalry is decimated by German mechanised units, the horse passes into the hands of a deserting German boy (David Kross, THE READER), then into the hands of a sweet French farm-girl and her grandfather (Niels Arestup) before being captured by the Germans to pull artillery.  It is thus fully a hundred minutes before our War Horse finally makes it to the front line, stranded in no-man's land, and cut free by a German and a Geordie (Toby Kebbell) in a scene clearly meant to evoke the common plight of the honest soldier. Finally, she is reunited with Albert, in an ending as endless as THE RETURN OF THE KING - first a reprieve from the doctor (Liam Cunningham), then a reprieve from an auction, and finally a ludicrously over-coloured reunion with mother (Emily Watson) and father back in Devon.  

This film is technically accomplished, particularly in its depiction of the front line. But its substance is confused and contradictory - the fault of Spielberg and his screenwriters Lee Hall (BILLY ELLIOT) and Richard Curtis (of all those awful fantasy-London films such as NOTTING HILL and LOVE ACTUALLY).   On the one hand, Spielberg wants us to sympathise with honest working folk - Ned Narracott and the Grandfather in France who bid in auctions against evil capitalist materialists.  Then again, he has an almost Downton-esque deference towards descent upper-class chaps who promise "man to man" to take care of horses.   No-one is really evil here.  Ned Narracott isn't really a feckless drunk.  Grand-pere isn't a coward but a principled pacifist. Even the German generals just have a job to do.  No-one is killed on screen. And of course, we never believe a major character is really in peril.

There are two scenes in this drawn-out farce that are worth a damn. The first is a scene where Major Jamie Stewart (Benedict Cumberbatch) - a gentleman cavalry officer of the old school - is unhorsed by a German artillery attack and mocked by his opposing officer. This moment - Major Stewart's resignation and realisation - sums up the tragedy and stupidity of the Great War. A generation that had been bred to gallantry - that should have learned from Crimea - finally had their illusions shattered by the first mechanised war.  The second scene is the depiction of going over the top at the Somme and the aerial pull-back showing body upon body impaled on barbed-wire wooden fences and trampled into the mud.  There is the horror of the war.  One doesn't need the deliberate emotional manipulation of a stranded horse to provoke the audience's pity.

WAR HORSE is on release in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, Hong Kong, Israel, Ireland, Malta, Poland and Spain. It is released on the 19th January in Greece; on January 26th in Denmark, Kazakhstan, Russia, Slovenia, Estonia and Lithuania. It is released on February 2nd in Belgium, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Norway and Turkey; on February 9th in Argentina, Hungary and Romania; on February 17th in Germany and Italy; on February 23rd in France, Portugal, Finland and Sweden; and on  March 2nd in Japan. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 16 - THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Jolyon Coy (Philip), Kate Ogborn (producer), Tom Hiddleston (Freddie), 
Terence Davies (director and screenwriter), Sarah Kants (Liz), 
Harry Hadden-Paton (Jackie) at the premiere of THE DEEP BLUE SEA

This review is brought to you by Professor007, long missing from these pages, and a dutiful stand-in when reviewsmoviebook was struck down by cine-flu.

It is rare these days to find a movie that captivates one for its length. It is rarer still to find a movie that keeps one in its spell well beyond the hustle of the tube on the way back home.

Terrence Davies' adaptation of Terrence Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea is such a masterpiece. It is beautifully set in 1950s London, yet its topic is timeless. Hester (Rachel Weisz), a young and attractive woman of simple background, who is married to William (Simon Russell Beale), a distinguished man of law considerably her senior, falls in love with the young and handsome maverick Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). In Freddie, Hester seems to find the passion, lust, and physicality that she misses in her married life. Some months into the affair, however, William finds out and Hester decides to leave William and move in with her lover. Freddie, however, seems unprepared for such co-habitation: mentally stuck in his life as hero during World War II, he struggles to find a new focus in life, and is unable to emotionally care for anyone else than himself. Despite this lack of attention by Freddie and her husband's continued attempts to win her back, Hester's love for Freddie is unbroken. She does not, however, get the committed and passionate relationship she so desires, and with every increasingly desperate failed attempt to win Freddie over, she degrades herself more and more.

What is striking in its sadness and yet utter plausibility is how the behaviour of three people, of which neither is spiteful or keen to hurt the other ones, can lead to such pain and misfortune. Rachel Weisz beautifully portrays a woman who, in her attempt to find love and passion, knowingly destroys her life. William, excellently played by Simon Russell Beale, tries to win her back, but is too restrained by his upbringing to show the emotions his wife may be longing for so much. Finally, Freddie is a man who struggles with the void of purpose in his life and at the same time is overwhelmed by the passion of his lover.

To me, an oscar candidate for best movie, best actress and best supporting actor. On vera.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2011. It will be released in the UK on November 25th and the US in December.

THOR 3D - a movie so dull it took me two weeks to work up the energy to review it

THOR is a super-hero movie so simplistic that it makes you feel like BATMAN BEGINS never happened.  I left the theatre bored and patronized.  Not to mention shocked that the director – Kenneth Branagh – who brought us intelligent and subtle readings of Shakespeare – was trading in such trite pastiche.  The movie neither challenges intellectually nor delights visually. It is – both in terms of style and content – an absolute zero.

The plot has two parts to it, but both are hackneyed and predictable. The first part is your typical Oedipal tale of familial jealousy and revenge.  Papa loves big brother (Thor) more than little brother, so little brother gets his revenge by framing big brother and having him exiled before usurping his father’s throne. This all takes place in a Norse superhero world peopled by buff gods in He-Man outfits but decorated by Trump.  There is an inter-world travel-ator which looks like a posh version of the Star Trek transporter and is, shock! horror! to comic book fans, guarded by a black god.  (The only shock I felt was why Idris Elba – so brilliant in The Wire – was slumming it in this dreck). This brings us to the second part of the story, which is basically your typical, predictable fish-out-of-water rom-com, as last seen in Disney’s THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG.  Aforementioned big brother gets exiled to earth where he meets a hot chick who just happens to be an astrophysicist. He learns how not to be an arrogant arse after one night’s deep and meaningful conversation on top of a camper van, and then buggers off to save his world.

The issue here is that the movie is cheap.  It looks cheap and it goes for cheap laughs. Thor is undoubtedly a camp character but then so is Batman. The problem here is that he is also one-dimensional, whereas Batman has nuance and conflict. Thor’s character “development” from idiot-jock to sensitive-hippie is boring because it doesn’t come by stages but rather at the flick of a switch. The  script-writers are simply uninterested in exploring the genre conventions in which they are operating, and to the post-modern viewer, the result is a movie that seems old clunky, simplistic and frankly, just not trying hard enough.  At worst, it feels like pastiche.  There is little point in discussing performances –for what hope do the actors have to dazzle when they are asked to be little more than cardboard cut-outs? Natalie Portman, as the love interest, Jane, simply has to swoon.  Chris Hemsworth, as Thor, simply has to be ridiculous and be-muscled. Anthony Hopkins, as Papa Odin, has to be austere. And poor Tom Huddlestone, used to much finer fair in British independent cinema, is reduced to twirling his pantomime moustaches as little brother, Loki. This cheapens the actors as much as it cheapens the audience. Poor show, all round. 

THOR is on release in all markets bar Japan where it opens on July 1st.

ARCHIPELAGO

Joanna Hogg's debut feature, UNRELATED, was an emotional drama so quietly powerful - so cleanly produced - that I was tempted to tag it Pantheon and dare history to prove me wrong. Her second feature, ARCHIPELAGO, has all the virtues of UNRELATED, and if less immediately gripping that her first film (perhaps because expectations are so much higher?), is still miles ahead of most current cinema in its ability to mine the deeply held frustrations of familial relations. ARCHIPELAGO is a satisfyingly uncomfortable watch - a movie both darkly funny; raw; bitter; and all finely balanced on a knife edge.

The film begins as Edward (Tom Hiddleston) arrives on the Cornish holiday island of Tresco to spend a final fortnight with his family before abandoning a City career for a year's charity work in Africa. The fortnight will consist of walks, bicycle rides, picnics, painting and the occasional dinner. Edward's mother Patricia (Kate Fahy) and sister Cynthia (a scene-stealing Lydia Leonard) are already there not to mention a cook, Rose (Amy Lloyd) and a painting tutor (Christopher Baker). But, much to Ed's chagrin, his girlfriend Chloe hasn't been allowed to come because she's not family with a capital "F", and much to Cynthia and Patricia's discomfort, the father doesn't show up either.

And this brings us to the meat of the story: what family is and what one should expect of them. Ed's family are not supportive of his belated gap year. His mother is quietly negative. ("Ed's decision doesn't reflect badly on his father" when clearly she thinks it does.) His sister is openly, brutally critical. One can tell that both are hitting somewhere near the mark - Ed clearly doesn't know what he is about to do - but there means of expressing it is truly poisonous and stems in some part from frustration with the absent father.

As the film progresses, each member of the family reveals more of themselves despite the covering layers of upper-middle class politeness. There are, however, no big dramatic revelations - no moments of crisis - no moments of catharsis followed by closure. Joanna Hogg maintains the tone of strained emotions throughout - eschewing big bang finishes for an authentic examination of real emotions. The purity and austerity of this approach is underscored by her shooting style, which typically uses static cameras in still frames which may or may not include the faces of the people speaking; avoids introduced lighting often leaving her characters in darkness; and avoids artificial sound-tracks making those uncomfortable silences even more ominous.

The resulting film is difficult, honest and painful, because so much of the behaviour is recognisable. Like her previous film, UNRELATED, ARCHIPELAGO seems to live in a space where characters live in self-delusion but are stripped bare in a sequestered environment. Interns of content, Joanna Hogg reminds me of Nicole Holofcener, the American director who has made similarly painful, scabrous films about the emotional lives of the upper-middle classes. But the austerity of Hogg's style is quite unique.

ARCHIPELAGO played London 2010 and goes on release in the UK today.